Rahm Emanuel to announce 2019 as the Year of Chicago Theatre

Chicago Tribune photo

The Goodman Theatre and stage door for the Oriental Theatre, from Nederlander Alley in the Loop. Theaters big and small stand to benefit from the city initiative Year of Chicago Theatre, announced Monday.

The Goodman Theatre and stage door for the Oriental Theatre, from Nederlander Alley in the Loop. Theaters big and small stand to benefit from the city initiative Year of Chicago Theatre, announced Monday. (Chicago Tribune photo)

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is to make it official on Monday: 2019 is to be the Year of Chicago Theatre.

A citywide initiative dreamed up and spearheaded by the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the designation will result, said DCASE Commissioner Mark Kelly, in a variety of benefits for local theaters, including extensive new advertising at O’Hare and Midway airports, international promotion by the city tourism agency Choose Chicago, a variety of fresh public events at venues like Millennium Park and at least $200,000 in new city grants.

Emanuel, who has announced he will not stand for re-election in 2019, described assuring the long-term health of the performing arts in Chicago as a “personal passion” and said the Year of Chicago Theatre was something he “very much wanted to get done” prior to his exit from his office.

“The Chicago theater is exciting and vital,” Kelly said, “but it also is fragile and needs to be supported.”

Kelly said he’d been struck by reading tourism reports on why visitors come to the the city and finding many of them unaware of the city’s illustrious theater scene with its scores of vibrant companies, typically nonprofit and located in the neighborhoods. “The Chicago theater has never been sufficiently branded,” Kelly said. “This is an attempt to put that right.”

The new endeavor — similar to the 2018 designation as the Year of Creative Youth in Chicago — is being promoted as the first of its kind.

In other major theater cities, such as New York City or London, the commercial operators long have branded terms like “Broadway” and “West End,” making those words synonymous in the public’s mind with top-tier live entertainment and turning them into primary tourist draws for those cities. The Chicago theater, though, is a much more complex and diverse sector. Variously defined, it consists of everything from multimillion-dollar productions like “Hamilton” in the Loop to internationally known and fiscally stable nonprofits like the Chicago Shakespeare, Goodman or Steppenwolf theaters, to community-oriented companies operating on dramatic shoestrings and often throwing metaphoric stones at the Emanuel administration, which strives to be their benefactor. Historically, this mix of some 250 for-profit and mission-based neighborhood players has been hard for the public outside Chicago to grasp.

Although the dominant public rhetoric is one of cooperation and community — by contrast, it invariably is said, with those other cities — Chicago arts organizations can also be contentious and highly competitive with one another behind the scenes. Precisely how the goodies will be divvied up among the various disparate players with their various disparate agendas has yet to be fully decided, Kelly said, but he also said the intent was to benefit everyone without prejudice or regard to for-profit or nonprofit status, from the Lyric Opera to local improv troops and from major dance companies to local puppeteers.

“This great cultural form lives in Chicago in a way that’s unlike any other city,” he said. “We’re asking everyone to offer their support.”

The level of city marketing investment clearly will be unlike anything that has been afforded the industry in the past. But in practical terms, given the state of city finances, the designation may be most useful as a clarifying form of political leverage, putting pressure on business leaders and foundations to get behind new initiatives for Chicago theater. Nonetheless, such components as the city airports promotion and the tourism initiative represent support worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.

According to the city, the marketing agency FCB Chicago has come up with a new slogan: “Chicago theater is the fearless soul of Chicago.”

Other plans to be announced Monday include a theatrical redesign of the League of Chicago Theatre’s Hot Tix office on Randolph Street and other “pop-up” versions of the last-minute-ticket outlet appearing at McCormick Place convention center and elsewhere; theater-themed exhibitions at the Chicago Cultural Center; city-sponsored performances and promotions in a variety of parks; and a concerted new effort just to get regular Chicago residents to better understand their famous hometown theaters.

League of Chicago Theatres Executive Director Deb Clapp said she was “thrilled” to get Kelly’s approach and that one of her organization’s goals was to get “every single Chicagoan inside a theater” in 2019.